Covering Urban Unrest: The Headline Says It All

:The headline of a newspaper account of a racial urban riot was manipulated to depict the event as either labor conflict or neutral in terms of social context. The results indicate that reader perception of the news account depended on the headline. Under the racial headline, injuries to the police were considered more severe than under either the union or the neutral situation. Under the racial headline, the motivations of the demonstrators were understood best and deemed highly justified. Under the neutral headline, the same actions were strongly condemned. Under the union riot headline sympathy shifted toward the demonstrators whose injuries were overestimated while those of the police were minimized. The effects were enhanced by the interaction between experimental condition and increased schematic sophistication of the subjects. The author explains the results in the context of the different information processing schemata invoked by the manipulated headlines. His discussion focuses on the social responsibility of the media in their coverage of urban unrest.